"Finding the right hotel can make or break your vacation, so with this in mind, we’re introducing Hotel Finder, a new experimental search tool specifically designed to help you find that perfect hotel. Google Hotel Finder makes it easy to narrow down the options…"

"Some of the biggest company/brand accounts on Google+ have now — finally, some might say — been removed.

The Google Plus pages for Mashable, Ford and Sesame Street are all gone. Our own Search Engine Land page has also been removed. Mashable was, according to SocialStatistics.com, the No. 4 most popular account on Google+ with more than 103,000 followers.

All of those accounts have been replaced by a 404 error message. (Update: see postscript at the end of this article.)

Google has been removing business/brand accounts for more than a week now, but some users were unhappy with the random nature of the process. Some accounts were zapped early on while others seemed to get special treatment, or at least were ignored, and continued to increase their following."

User review and search service Yelp is keeping up its brisk growth, and to celebrate that its 20 million reviews, the company created this infographic showing a heat map of all user submissions across the United States.

Even though Groupon, LivingSocial and Google are making great strides in the local space, they’re not really in the reviews business — which still allows Yelp to enjoy explosive growth.

"Features That Facebook Left Out Once Looked Like Opportunities. Then Along Came Google+

Google's new social network Google+ may never dent Facebook's dominance, but its entrance into the fray is scrambling the emerging market of startups billing themselves as Facebook alternatives.

The current crop isn't looking to take down Facebook, now 750 million users strong. Rather, they're offering a more intimate social networking experience in the vein of Google+, positioning themselves as another option for Facebook users who might be tired of sifting through status updates from hundreds of so-called "friends" and navigating the site's sometimes cryptic privacy settings but who would never abandon it altogether."